The great convergence

Breaking down the walls between IT and Facilities doesn't just make good
business sense, it's an important growth strategy

By Tom Stanford

Rapid IoT adoption has made facilities management a more
strategic business function

Facilities and IT teams need to
collaborate on a number of business‑critical tasks

Unified
software platforms can help manage new workflows between the two
groups

It’s an age‑old story: IT and facilities management teams don’t talk
to each other. In many companies, these two groups live on opposite
sides of a soundproof wall.

Facilities and IT don’t just work in separate areas of the
building—they inhabit separate worlds, speak different languages, and
have contrasting personalities. In my experience, facilities managers
tend to be strong‑willed and independent. They proudly think of the
buildings and assets under their care as their facilities.

IT people also take tremendous pride in their work, with an
inclination towards being more analytical in their thinking. Now, more
than ever, this separation must end. There’s a fundamental
transformation underway in industry that’s creating significant
overlap between the two functions.

Facilities and IT are being asked to collaborate every day on
business‑critical tasks such as onboarding and offboarding employees,
opening new buildings, asset management, event tracking, account
provisioning, and data management. Smart companies understand that
getting Facilities and IT to work together doesn’t just make business
sense. It’s becoming a competitive advantage and an important growth strategy.

Technology is playing a key role in this convergence. More companies
are using software platforms to streamline workplace systems and
integrate core functions such as real estate portfolio and project
management, maintenance planning, and sustainability.

An important feature of these workplace management systems is to
integrate facilities and space management into every aspect of the
enterprise. In some sense, virtually every business these days is a
facilities company—whether they realize it or not.

Take healthcare. In a hospital or clinic, you can no longer separate
a respirator from the physical environment in which it exists. Both
are absolutely vital for patient care and are measured and evaluated
in terms of risk. It’s essential that care providers get both right.

A large hospital might house more than $1 billion worth of
equipment, including 50,000 devices, with a facilities team of about
40 people maintaining it all. Five years ago, the facilities people
generally operated on an island. Rarely did they talk to IT and IT
never talked to them.

Now they work together because they must. A typical operating room
in a modern hospital is a technological wonder. There are dozens of
monitors and electronic devices fed by dedicated power supplies in the
walls. Sensors are everywhere, forming a network of IoT devices that
keeps tabs on patients, the equipment and the environment. In this
setting, Facilities, IT and clinical engineering teams must work
together, and not just for the sake of efficiency. Collaboration can
literally be a matter of life or death.

Now consider a completely different business environment—retail
convenience stores. A typical regional convenience store chain with
350 outlets can sell more than $1 billion worth of coffee annually, at
gross margins of more than 90 percent. That means the coffee machines
are strategic to the business.

That’s why many of these machines are connected devices that run on
an underlying software platform, so that if something goes wrong, it’s
much easier to detect and fix. Making sure coffee machines are always
up and running has become a mission‑critical task—one that Facilities
plays a vital role in supporting.

Technology is critical to a successful outcome. Your organization
must be armed with a flexible, cloud‑based platform that automates
workflows across teams. In the past, Facilities and IT teams might
have used dozens of disparate apps, manual processes, spreadsheets,
and legacy systems to get their daily work done. By getting everyone
on the same platform, Facilities and IT can track assets, relocate
staff, manage new buildings, and onboard and offboard employees much
more efficiently.

It’s an exciting time for Facilities and IT, two departments at the
forefront of digital transformation. To reap the benefits of emerging
technologies, they must now work side by side.

Convergence 101

Breaking down the walls between Facilities and IT isn’t easy, and it
doesn’t happen overnight. Here’s a roadmap to align these two critical
business functions.

The first step is to empower your functional leadership teams with
the resources needed to foster more collaboration between IT and
Facilities. A small, focused cross‑functional leadership team can
enable faster and more informed decision‑making and build permanent
bridges across the two organizations.

The cross‑functional team should outline a unified vision for the
departments. The analysis should examine the internal infrastructure,
systems, and platforms for which each department is responsible, and
determine where duties overlap. The strategy should include clear and
attainable goals that can be reached over three, six, and 12 months.

Tom Stanford is the founder and CEO of Nuvolo Technologies and
has more than 25 years of experience building new technology ventures.
His new venture development activities include SaaS, enterprise
software and professional services. Tom holds graduate and
undergraduate degrees from Northeastern University.